460 OBSERVATIONS ON 



allow no bents to rise : hence warrens produce much 

 the most delicate turf for gardens. Sheep never touch 

 the stalks of grasses. 



CAT AND SQUIRRELS 2 . 



A BOY has taken three little young squirrels in their 

 nest, or drey as it is called in these parts. These small 

 creatures he put under the care of a cat who had lately 

 lost her kittens, and finds that she nurses and suckles 

 them with the same assiduity and affection as if they 

 were her own offspring. This circumstance corrobo- 

 rates my suspicion, that the mention of exposed and 

 deserted children being nurtured by female beasts of 

 prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable 



so, and did not begin near so soon to eat what was offered to them. It is 

 not customary with children to disturb the young rabbits till they are a 

 few days old, so that these wild rabbits had exactly the same education 

 as the tame ones, and yet the result was different. It is evident then that 

 there was a natural difference of character between them from their birth, 

 and a consideration of this point may be important in understanding even 

 the differences between the several races of mankind. It is probable that 

 the state of constant apprehension in which the wild rabbit lives, occa- 

 sions an irritability of nerve which does not exist in the domestic race, 

 and that such irritability occasions an actual difference in the quality of 

 its fibres which is descendible in its generations. In the same manner it 

 appears to me likely that savages do not acquire acuteness of hearing 

 and some other peculiarities merely from the greater exercise of certain 

 faculties from infancy, but because the extraordinary exercise of those 

 faculties during several generations has rendered the organs which ap- 

 pertain to them different in their texture and tone from those of other 

 races of men in whom those faculties have been quiescent, and more 

 rarely or less intensely called into use. 



These rabbits from wild parents, being now above half grown, continue 

 to start away and crouch upon any quick movement of the boy that feeds 

 them, while those of the domestic stock crowd round him ; their timidity 

 and want of confidence being unquestionably an inherited and not an 

 acquired peculiarity. W. H. 



2 The squirrel's nest is not only called a drey in Hampshire, but, also, 

 in other counties ; in Suffolk it is called a bay. The word drey, though 

 now provincial, I have met with in some of our old writers. MITFORD. 



The drey is not only the breeding-place, but the storehouse for the 

 animal's provisions. G. D. 



In the north of Hampshire a great portion of the squirrels have white 

 tails. None of this variety, as far as I can learn, reach the London market. 



